Outfield Technologies is a Cambridge-based agri-tech start-up company which uses drones and artificial intelligence, to help fruit growers maximise their harvest from orchard crops. Outfield Technologies' founders Jim McDougall and Oli Hilbourne have been working with Ph.D. student Tom Roddick from the Department's Machine Intelligence Laboratory to develop their technology capabilities to be able to count the blossoms and apples on a tree via drones surveying enormous apple orchards. "An accurate assessment of the blossom or estimation of the harvest allows growers to be more productive, sustainable and environmentally friendly", explains Outfield's commercial director Jim McDougall. "Our aerial imagery analysis focuses on yield estimation and is really sought after internationally. One of the biggest problems we're facing in the fruit sector is accurate yield forecasting. This system has been developed with growers to plan labour, logistics and storage. It's needed throughout the industry, to plan marketing and distribution, and to ensure that there are always apples on the shelves. Estimates are currently made by growers, and they do an amazing job, but orchards are incredibly variable and estimates are often wrong by up to 20%. This results in lost income, inefficient operations and can result in substantial amount of wastage in unsold crop."

Video: Ethan Haus, a 6-year-old boy who went missing, was found after a private drone operator was able to spot the missing boy using heat-seeking technology. A missing 6-year-old boy from Minnesota and his dog were found Wednesday after hundreds of volunteers -- including one who used his own drone with a thermal camera -- searched for him for hours. Ethan Haus got off the bus with his siblings around 4 p.m. on Tuesday near Becker, a city roughly 47 miles northwest of Minneapolis, and ran to play with the family dog, Remington, officials said. When Ethan and the dog didn't return home, a massive search ensued, with more than 600 volunteers and numerous law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, working to find the young boy who was outside in temperatures in the low 40s, Sherburne County Sheriff Joel Brott said in a news release. Ethan Haus, 6, was discovered laying with his dog in a cornfield early Wednesday morning.

Recognising the huge potential impact of AI in global health, The Rockefeller Foundation and United States Agency for International Development's (USAID) Center for Innovation and Impact (CII) partnered, in close coordination with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, developed and launch today a groundbreaking new report: AI in Global Health: Defining a Collective Path Forward. In the past decade emerging technologies have been flooring the gas petal driving exponential innovation in almost all fields and industries. From blockchain and cryptocurrencies, to getting your groceries delivered by drone (UAVs) on your front lawn, to using artificial intelligence (AI) as a Swiss Army knife to'fix' everything, new technologies present significant potential to bring real and meaningful change, especially in healthcare. Technologies like AI are rapidly evolving, yet are still at an early-stage, which provides the development ecosystem the unique opportunity to take an active part in shaping the market to make sure new technologies are introduced and scaled effectively and appropriately. The report states it's important to acknowledge that AI is a means to an end for global health impact and not always the right or best solution for every health challenge.

The United States is home to the largest drone market in the world and has been for the past few years. The US will remain in the lead in the forthcoming years, but the Chinese drone market is slowly closing that gap. While in 2024 the US will still be the largest drone market in the world, the Chinese drone market will be catching up as it will grow faster. Even though the US market won't grow quite as quickly as some others (China, and India), it will still be one of the fastest growing drone markets in the world. By 2024 it is expected to be almost three times the size it was in 2018.

Fox News Flash top headlines for Oct. 15 are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com They can form swarms of hundreds of mini, precision-guided explosives, overwhelm radar or simply blanket an area with targeting sensors. They can paint or light up air, ground or sea targets for enemy fighters, missiles or armored vehicles, massively increasing warzone vulnerability. The can instantly emerge from behind mountains to fire missiles at Army convoys, infantry on the move or even mechanized armored columns.

Fox News Flash top headlines for Oct. 14 are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com Attacking enemy lines as a heavily up-gunned armored robot, firing lasers, knocking enemy drones out of the air with "elevating" weapons, controlling air and ground drones as networked "nodes" in war and using AI to organize long-range targeting data -- are all desired attributes for the Army's new infantry vehicle - the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle. The new vehicle, slated to ultimately replace the decades-old Bradley, will achieve operational combat status as soon as 2026 -- and, according to Army documents, pave the way forward into a new era of major, high-powered, mechanized warfare. As it enters a new prototyping and test phase for the vehicle, the Army is further refining its ambitious and high-standard requirements.

Microsoft's 2019 Surface event is just hours away, so before we kick off coverage at 10AM ET, it's time to lay out everything we're hoping to see unveiled. Also, Nintendo released a major upgrade for Super Mario Maker 2, and we have a review of the latest GoPro action camera. Its AI can avoid objects even when you're flying in manual mode.Skydio's next self-flying drone is ready to take on DJI According to the company, the Skydio 2 is much closer to its true vision: a practical, truly autonomous drone that also does anything a regular drone can. Unlike its previous effort, the R1, this drops the price from $2,500 to $999, is more practical to carry around and comes with a better camera that can shoot 4K at 60 frames per second. You don't have to play with randos anymore.You can finally play online with your friends on'Super Mario Maker 2' Nintendo has finally rolled out the ability to play with friends online in Super Mario Maker 2. The game launched with online co-op and competitive modes, but you could only play with random people via matchmaking -- if you wanted to play with friends, local play was your only option.

The Pentagon, taking the next big step of deploying artificial intelligence to aid troops and help select battlefield targets, must settle lingering ethical concerns about using the technology for waging war. Search giant Google dealt a blow last year to the military's maiden artificial intelligence, or AI, program sorting drone footage. Thousands of employees protested working on surveillance technology they said eventually could be used to kill. The Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center is pushing ahead with a new series of AI projects that will be rolled out to commanders over the coming year with an expected funding boost from Congress. At the same time, a defense board is hammering out ethical guidelines for the cutting-edge technology.

British healthcare workers are hostile to their robotic co-workers, committing "minor acts of sabotage" such as standing in their way, according to a recent study by De Montfort University, which chided the humans for "not playing along with" their automated peers. The researchers contrasted the "problematic" British attitude with that of Norwegian workers, who embraced their silicon colleagues, even giving them friendly nicknames. Some 30 percent of UK jobs will be lost to automation within 15 years if current trends continue apace, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. The percentage is even greater in the US (38 percent) as well as Germany and France (37 percent), but falls to 25 percent in Scandinavian countries like Norway and Finland. Perhaps this explains the difference in workplace interactions between the British and the Norwegians - the latter aren't as worried about losing their jobs to an electronic interloper.

--Smart and agile drones are fast becoming ubiquitous at the edge of the cloud. The usage of these drones are constrained by their limited power and compute capability. In this paper, we present a Transfer Learning (TL) based approach to reduce on-board computation required to train a deep neural network for autonomous navigation via Deep Reinforcement Learning for a target algorithmic performance. A library of 3D realistic meta-environments is manually designed using Unreal Gaming Engine and the network is trained end-to- end. These trained meta-weights are then used as initializers to the network in a test environment and fine-tuned for the last few fully connected layers. V ariation in drone dynamics and environmental characteristics is carried out to show robustness of the approach. Using NVIDIA GPU profiler it was shown that the energy consumption and training latency is reduced by 3.7x and 1.8x respectively without significant degradation in the performance in terms of average distance traveled before crash i.e. The approach is also tested on a real environment using DJI T ello drone and similar results were reported. The video of the drone with proposed approach will be uploaded to Y ouTube. VER the past decade, Unmanned aerial vehicle (UA V) are emerging as a new form of IoT devices being used in varied applications such as reconnaissance, surveying, rescuing and mapping. Irrespective of the application, navigating autonomously is one of the key desirable features of UA Vs both indoors and outdoors.